I am involved with a community project to update Open Street Map for use with Soundscape to aid the visually impaired. One feature we were looking to include is Talking Buildings. There are around 30 Talking Buildings in the area which have an approx. 1 minute long audio explanation attached to them. I was wondering if there was any way that you would suggest signposting these buildings on OSM so people can know that they are there, and are Talking Buildings? Also, would there be anyway to integrate the audio in to the map?
In real life the Talking Building files are accesible via Sound Cloud. There is no physical speaker in the building. However, the idea is that if these buildings could be signposted in some way on OSM, then on Soundscape the visually impaired person could be made aware of this, so that they know to access the Soundcloud file. Or even it could be directly linked for ease of access.
I’d just negotiate with MS’ app developers for a tag to use (you can make one up and tell them what it is). As long as it’s not used for anything else in OSM already you shouldn’t have any problems.
You can then document it so that other app developers can use it too.
Hi there James. I am part of the Soundscape team at Microsoft. Are you part of the Talking Buildings project going on at St Albans by any chance?
Feel free to contact me direct if you want to take this offline. The answer to this is a sort of yes and no. If information is in OSM for a building, then in theory it is possible to call it out to the user. If you want to create audio files associated with a building, and if you want Soundscape to play this audio file then this is something that the Soundscape team would need to add as a new feature. This support is not there at the moment, and I don’t know of any plans in the short term, but I know it has been discussed.
If you contact me offline, we can discuss this in more detail.